Orchestrating data collection saves 60-70% time

Orchestrating data collection saves 60-70% time

Have you ever looked into the kitchen of a Michelin-starred restaurant? One person does nothing but create the finest appetizers, while another uses tweezers to arrange flower petals on your dessert. The courses don’t have much to do with each other individually. But together, they create your dining experience. The beauty of such a kitchen is that everyone is 100% attuned to each other. They know exactly who needs to do what, and without much talking, they deliver top performances.

If only all business processes were so smoothly aligned; data collection would be a lot less time-consuming. In this article, you’ll read how to leverage Data Orchestration to integrate processes like a star team.

Wasting time on the wrong things

Operational and financial teams spend an average of 60 to 70% of their time on data collection and verification. Quite a waste, as you’d rather use these scarce people's valuable time on what really matters: conducting analyses that add value to your organization. This problem gets even bigger if data is poorly managed, siloed, or entirely inaccessible. Unfortunately, even a ‘simple’ spreadsheet doesn’t escape this issue. Manual data entry is a guarantee for errors in the data you collect.

Integrating processes: what tools do you use?

Suppose you want to approach this more intelligently. Let’s apply that to the major planning processes of any manufacturing company: HR, Sales & Marketing, IT, and Operations. It is crucial that this is well integrated with the financial process. What tools do you use to orchestrate this?

Automating with a DataWarehouse

Want to eliminate that time waste and gain deep insights? Then it’s crucial to add automation and flexibility to the planning. There are a range of solutions for this, housed in a DataWarehouse that serves as the single point of truth. For example, SAP DataSphere, SAP BW, SAP HANA, which you use for the input, throughput & output of process data. An additional advantage is that you can use the analytical capabilities (SAC, AFO, Power BI) for the orchestrated data.

SAP Cloud-related tools that support processes

We work a lot with SAP-oriented clients and see that they often already have all the SAP tools in-house. Most also have a cloud strategy or are moving towards one. The ‘only’ thing left to do is utilize all the available SAP tools. You connect them via a URL and can use them from there. There is a tool for each process:

• SAP IBP - Operations Planning

• SAP SuccessFactors - HR

• SAP DataSphere / HANA Cloud - DataWarehouse

• SAC - Dashboarding, Reporting

• SAC Planning - Financial

• CPI - Collaboration between the tools

Which step provides you the most value?

That depends on the maturity of your current organizational tooling collaboration:

• Reactive: You have data silos with manual enrichments

• Integrate: You have reactive (historical) data shared between tools

• Collaborative: You have one set of data and KPIs that form a single source of truth. Data is shared with partners

• Orchestrate: You already have full data orchestration across systems, saving you 60-70% of the time to analyze and improve instead of collecting. This is the end goal where you also have Data Science capabilities to be statistically supported externally in your planning processes

How much time can you save on data collection?

First, determine what level you are at the moment. Want to know how to make this happen? Contact Bas Gijsbers or Roel van Bommel.

*This is the second blog in a series about planning business processes that span across different tools (SAP IBP, CPI, SAP DataSphere, SAC Planning, SAC).